CALS Information Technology Office

Notes on choosing passwords

Do not choose passwords that have any personal reference to
yourself; for example, your nickname, license plate, pet's name, city
of birth, or a hobby.

Nonsense words, unusual acronyms, and deliberate misspellings are
good passwords.

Adding numbers, special characters or capitalization makes a
password more difficult to guess.

Do not choose a word that is in a dictionary, even if you add
numbers or special symbols before or after the word.

A good technique for making easy to remember, but hard to guess
passwords is to take two short words, and concatenate them together
with a number or symbol in the middle. For example, take the words
"frog" and "pen" and then your password could be "frog5pen". That's
fairly easy to remember, but would be fairly hard for someone else to
guess.

Your passwords provide access to your private, and often confidential,
information. It's important to pick a strong password that's difficult
for someone else to guess. Computing and Information Technology
recommends that you do not write your password down anywhere.